snivilous
Senior Member
Since my last post my German Shepherd, Cheyenne, aka "snivilous", has passed away. She was 11 years old and my parents had to put her down while I was still away at school. She had had some issues over the past year and slowed down a lot since she turned 10, which we found out earlier this year was a side effect of her having a fairly advanced stage of cancer. Up to her last moments she was still a crazy fun having doof, I was hopeful she would make it past the end of the year and I could be with her once I graduated in the fall, but her health didn't agree with that. My username was based off her nickname, so figured it would be fitting to share what happened and obviously I've posted lots of photos and she was my best buddy and wheeling copilot for the majority of my life. Hope you're enjoying yourself, where ever that may be...
Onto happier topics, on Friday my girlfriend and I packed up and drove home for the summer. It's nice that my girlfriend has a V8 4Runner to tow my land cruiser and motorcycles home
The 40 series met my sister's new 80 series (she rolled her last one a few months ago).
So finally, I started working on the runner today! I want to get it to a solid daily driver this summer and do some simple and easy mods to get it reliable and fun. The FJ40 is an epic vehicle to drive, and tons of fun, but it is definitely not ideal to drive everyday, especially in the winter where waiting 10 minutes for a carburetor to warm up is annoying. With the help of the 40 I got the runner to fire up and idle for awhile.
The 4runner does NOT like idling, this became an issue when it was still in Utah last year and I assumed it was the idle air control valve, so today I figured I would start with fixing that... except apparently the IAC valve can't be cleaned/replaced on a 2001 which I read about today... I cleaned the MAF before firing it up and that didn't help, so I pulled the throttle body and took it apart.
The throttle body was nasty, but I'll be surprised if cleaning it fixed anything. I took the side panels off and everything internally was clean.
I ended with cleaning the throttle body and letting it dry out. My girlfriend's old Hyundai is in the shop right now and my dad and I are working on it so we can sell it, so I ended up working on it the rest of the day. My plan is to work on the runner slowly when I can and see if I can get it running nicely while it's still parked outside. Once the Hyundai is out of the shop, I can pull the runner in and go to town on it. Like I said, I just want it to be a good daily driver again. What I want to do is fix the engine (obviously), replace the steering rack, replace the rear links with heims (probably just buy the FROR kit), convert the rear to coilovers, replace the front seats, and build new front and rear bumpers, and get new 35s and beadlocks (the "old" ones that are on the FJ, will stay on the FJ).
So essentially everything is just small fixes, and there's lots of small fixes, but once all of those are taken care of it drive and handle awesome. In the future I want to go through the whole truck more thoroughly, and "correctly" replace everything I've done (engine cage and UCA mounts for example), but the near term goals are just to get it on the road and make it reliable and a hair more capable than it was before so I can continue to beat on it. I have a business trip all next week, but after that there will hopefully be incremental updates.
P.S. - Suggestions for image hosting sites? I've always used photobucket but lately it is absolutely the worst site I've ever used in my life. I tried imgur for this post but all it does is make my pictures massive. And flickr seems to require creating an entire yahoo account which I don't want to do -_-
Onto happier topics, on Friday my girlfriend and I packed up and drove home for the summer. It's nice that my girlfriend has a V8 4Runner to tow my land cruiser and motorcycles home
The 40 series met my sister's new 80 series (she rolled her last one a few months ago).
So finally, I started working on the runner today! I want to get it to a solid daily driver this summer and do some simple and easy mods to get it reliable and fun. The FJ40 is an epic vehicle to drive, and tons of fun, but it is definitely not ideal to drive everyday, especially in the winter where waiting 10 minutes for a carburetor to warm up is annoying. With the help of the 40 I got the runner to fire up and idle for awhile.
The 4runner does NOT like idling, this became an issue when it was still in Utah last year and I assumed it was the idle air control valve, so today I figured I would start with fixing that... except apparently the IAC valve can't be cleaned/replaced on a 2001 which I read about today... I cleaned the MAF before firing it up and that didn't help, so I pulled the throttle body and took it apart.
The throttle body was nasty, but I'll be surprised if cleaning it fixed anything. I took the side panels off and everything internally was clean.
I ended with cleaning the throttle body and letting it dry out. My girlfriend's old Hyundai is in the shop right now and my dad and I are working on it so we can sell it, so I ended up working on it the rest of the day. My plan is to work on the runner slowly when I can and see if I can get it running nicely while it's still parked outside. Once the Hyundai is out of the shop, I can pull the runner in and go to town on it. Like I said, I just want it to be a good daily driver again. What I want to do is fix the engine (obviously), replace the steering rack, replace the rear links with heims (probably just buy the FROR kit), convert the rear to coilovers, replace the front seats, and build new front and rear bumpers, and get new 35s and beadlocks (the "old" ones that are on the FJ, will stay on the FJ).
So essentially everything is just small fixes, and there's lots of small fixes, but once all of those are taken care of it drive and handle awesome. In the future I want to go through the whole truck more thoroughly, and "correctly" replace everything I've done (engine cage and UCA mounts for example), but the near term goals are just to get it on the road and make it reliable and a hair more capable than it was before so I can continue to beat on it. I have a business trip all next week, but after that there will hopefully be incremental updates.
P.S. - Suggestions for image hosting sites? I've always used photobucket but lately it is absolutely the worst site I've ever used in my life. I tried imgur for this post but all it does is make my pictures massive. And flickr seems to require creating an entire yahoo account which I don't want to do -_-
